Anti-war demonstrators ignore Iraqi terror

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"Bush is a baby-killer," screamed the signs during an anti-war
rally in London.

"Could I have the microphone for one minute to tell the people
of my life?" a 78-year-old Iraqi exile asked Rev. Jesse Jackson during the
anti-war demonstration. But according to the National Post, Jackson replied,
"Today is not about Saddam Hussein. Today is about Bush and Blair and the
massacre they plan in Iraq."

"Under the leadership of President Saddam Hussein," said Human
Rights Watch's policy paper on Iraq, " . . . the Iraqi government has
committed a vast number of crimes against the Iraqi people and others, using
terror through various levels of police, military, and intelligence agencies
to control and intimidate large segments of the Iraqi population. Two Iraqi
groups in particular have suffered horrific abuses -- the Kurds in the
north, and the Shi'a populations in the south. Two decades of oppression
against Iraq's Kurds and Kurdish resistance culminated in 1988 with a
genocidal campaign, and the use of chemical weapons, against Kurdish
citizens, resulting in over 100,000 deaths. . . . Saddam Hussein and others
. . . are responsible for a vast number of crimes that constitute genocide,
war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The victims of such crimes include
up to 290,000 persons who have been 'disappeared' since the late 1970s, many
of whom are believed to have been killed."

In an article called "Saddam's Shop of Horrors," JWR columnist Jeff
Jacoby notes, "Amnesty International once listed some 30 methods of torture
used in Iraq. They ranged from burning to electric shock to rape." Quoting
the New Republic's Robert Kaplan, Jacoby writes that Robert Spurling, an
American working in Baghdad, "had been taken away from his wife and
daughters at Saddam International Airport and tortured for four months with
electric shock, brass knuckles, and wooden bludgeons. His toes were crushed
and his toenails ripped out. He was kept in solitary confinement on a
starvation diet. Finally, American diplomats won his release. Multiply his
story by thousands, and you will have an idea what Iraq is like to this
day."

Jacoby also quotes the BBC interview of a former Iraqi torturer,
now in a Kurdish prison: "'If someone didn't break, they'd bring in the
family. . . . They'd bring the son in front of his parents, who were
handcuffed or tied, and they'd start with simple tortures such as cigarette
burns, and then if the father didn't confess, they'd start using more
serious methods,' such as slicing off one of the child's ears or amputating
a limb. 'They'd tell the father that they'd slaughter his son. They'd bring
a bayonet out. And if he didn't confess, they'd kill the child.'"

In 1987-88, the Iraqi government sprayed scores of Kurdish
villages with a combination of chemical weapons. Jacoby writes, "Scores of
thousands of Kurds died horrible deaths. Of those who survived, many were
left blind or sterile or crippled with agonizing lung damage. But most of
the Kurds slaughtered in that season of mass murder were not gassed but
rounded up and gunned down into mass graves. . . . In one village . . .
after the males were taken to be killed, the women and small children were
crammed into trucks and taken to a prison. One survivor, Salma Aziz Baban,
described the ordeal to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg . . . in the New Yorker:
. . . More than 2,000 women and children were crammed into a room and given
nothing to eat. When someone starved to death, the Iraqi guards demanded
that the body be passed to them through a window in the door. Baban's
6-year-old son grew very sick. 'He knew he was dying. . . . He started to
cry so much.' He died in his mother's lap. 'We gave them the body. It was
passed outside.' . . . Soon after, she pushed her way to the window to see
if her child had been taken for burial. She saw 20 dogs roaming in a field
where the dead bodies had been dumped. 'I looked outside and saw the legs
and hands of my son in the mouths of the dogs. The dogs were eating my
son.'"

Yet, at the anti-war march in London, the protestors never heard
any of these voices. "Abdel-Majid Khoi," said the National Post, "son of the
late Grand Ayatollah Khoi, Iraq's foremost religious leader for almost 40
years, spoke of the 'deep moral pain' he feels when hearing the so-called
'anti-war' discourse. 'The Iraqi nation is like a man who is kept captive
and tortured by a gang of thugs,' Khoi said. 'The proper moral position is
to fly to help that man liberate himself and bring the torturers to book.
But what we witness in the West is the opposite: support for the torturers
and total contempt for the victim.'"